Authors: Joan Crate
Glancing at her clock, she saw it had been an hour and seven minutes since she told Sister Bernadette to summon Joan. In just ten minutes, classes started.
“Come in, Sister,” she said. “And shut the door.”
As soon as Sister Joan was inside, she asked, “Sister, what is the meaning of this act of violence you perpetrated on Rose Marie Whitewater?” Her voice wavered only slightly.
Sister Joan lifted her chin. “The girl in question was undermining my authority in the classroom.” Her voice was shrill. “Setting a bad example for the other students. I tried every other form of punishment available to me. There was nothing else to do. I simply did what had to be done. What no one else in this school has the courage to do.” Sister Joan pursed her lips in that superior way she had and looked down at Mother Grace, challenge in her eyes.
“Why did you not come to me?”
Sister Joan snorted, just as Sister Margaret was always doing. Like a bull. An insubordinate bull intent on whipping the earth under its feet to a dust storm, its anger both righteous and demonic. A bull that thought nothing could stop it.
As a child on the farm, Mother Grace had had dealings with bulls, and she knew that a great deal of damage could be wreaked by beasts of the field who thought they were wild animals. Her own uncle had been killed by a plough horse, for heaven’s sake. Trampled to death. She felt heat course through her breast and rise to her head. She was angry, she realized.
En colère.
And it felt good.
“It is true, Sister Joan, that as yet no guidelines for corporal punishment have been issued by our superiors, neither the Church nor the government of Canada.
Except
that it must be given in the presence of the school principal. Are you aware of that?”
Again Sister Joan snorted.
“In fact, until this very afternoon, I never believed guidelines were needed. Let faith and common sense lead the sisters, I have always maintained. Today, Sister Joan, you have proven me wrong.” She rose, startled by her sudden agility.
Sister Joan took a step back.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy!”
she said, the words sounding strange to her. They seemed to break from a room in the core of her body, one that she had not been in for some time.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God.”
She stepped from behind her desk and moved closer to Sister Joan, who took another step back.
“The words of Jesus, our Saviour.
Dieu soit loué.
I cannot begin to tell you how very disappointed I am in you, Sister. How shameful your brutality, and against a child, one of the youngest in the school and certainly the smallest!” She took another step forward, enjoying Joan’s discomfort—her downcast eyes and purpling skin—as she backed her through the door. “You must pray to Him for guidance and forgiveness at all times of worship and an hour before sleep for two weeks. That is your penance! Do you understand?” Her voice was booming, loud enough, she realized with surprise, to be heard throughout the first floor.
Joan’s head twitched up and down.
“Good.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you
.”
She watched Sister Joan jerk open the door and bolt down the hall.
“I will be watching!” she cried after her.
A victory! She sat down as a wave of elation washed over. Looking through her office window, she observed the distant snow-covered mountains peering through whiffs of cloud like clouds themselves, like a presence, uncertain and undefined—like God, she thought—and she let it fill her. As her gaze fell to the prairie, vast, stretching everywhere around her, cold and empty, her elation ebbed away. Perhaps a very small victory.
Later, she wished she hadn’t made that last remark. Arrogance. Yet she could not stop feeling somewhat pleased with herself. As she hadn’t been for over three years. She hoped it was possible to maintain the clarity her righteous anger had provided.
D
AYS SHRANK AND
nights stretched. A blizzard hit at the end of the hunting moon. Rose Marie remembered Papa telling her, “That’s when the
mi-yiks-sop-oyi
swagger from the highest mountain peaks and swoop in.”
Mi-yiks-sop-oyi,
then
aahki-tsimii—
snow blowing, biting, freezing fingers and toes. At home, they had always stayed inside, all together, Papa telling stories, Mama feeding wood into the stove and making spruce tea. But this school was way, way east of home, east of the Reserve, even, and the wind grew bigger and madder as it swept over the plain, slamming fists against the brick school and making threats through the chinks.
I’m coming for you. I’ll get you.
No one was allowed outside. The cold, the cramped-up space, and the not-enough-to-eat could bring sickness, Rose Marie knew.
At night, the girls pretended to be asleep until Sister Cilla finished her last dormitory check. Then the big girls rose from their beds, tiptoed to the wardrobes, took off their nightdresses, pulled on uniforms and woollen stockings, tugged their nightdresses overtop, and helped the little ones do the same. Like all the others, Rose Marie tucked her head under her blanket and folded her shivery knees to her chest, but even in the extra clothes, she was cold and couldn’t get to sleep.
I’ll get you.
Everyone had a cough, and some students had to go to the hospital room—the “infirmary,” the sisters called it.
Rose Marie wasn’t the only one who kept waking at night, tossing and turning, digging into her skinny blankets. Some of the older girls invited younger sisters or cousins into their beds and snuggled them to sleep. All by herself, Rose Marie shivered.
“Move over,” Anataki grunted one night, then slid into Rose Marie’s bed and wrapped her twig arms and legs around her.
For the first time since she had arrived at St. Mark’s, Rose Marie slept peacefully the whole night through. She did not look up from her bed to see shadows clot together under the entrance light. Instead, she dreamt back to the shores of Mama’s and Papa’s bodies, and she, a small warm pond between them.
“I had the bestest dream,” Taki whispered to her the next morning as they huddled under the blanket. It was early, just after Sister Joan had clanged the bell downstairs on the nuns’ floor, and other than the shifting of sleeping girls, the dorm was still quiet. “We were across the invisible line at my relatives’ summer camp in Montana. Mama was cooking supper over the fire, and it smelled so good, and me and my brothers were fighting over whose turn it was to ride and who had to get the water. Sik-apsii is so bossy just because he’s the oldest and Awa-kaasii always thinks he can beat him up, but he can’t, and they don’t even want to let me have a turn on the horse, and the
ii-nii
started to move and all that dust turned red against the sun.” She stuck her tongue in the space where her front tooth had been and grinned. “It even felt nice and warm.”
Rose Marie could almost see it—the buffalo hurling into the red horizon. She could hear one brother slap the arm of the other, and Taki shout, “It’s my turn to ride,
kiis-to-wawa,
” as she ran for the horses.
A creak on the stairs. “Oh-oh,” Taki said. In the morning, Sister Margaret always carried her stick, and she whacked it down on the legs of any girls she caught sleeping in the same bed.
“I’ll wake Susanna and Martha. You get Josephine and Maria!” They leapt up and scampered along the rows of beds, hissing, “Wake up, Sister’s coming!”
* * *
The first
isi-ksopo
blustered in, warm, from the west, and the snow turned slushy. In the schoolyard, girls stamped their heels to make a squishing sound until their feet were soaked from the wet seeping through holes in their boots to the darned lumps in their stockings.
But as the wind died, a cold front moved in from the north.
The second Sunday in December, just before Mass, Mother Grace sat in her office, reflecting. Her desk overflowed with correspondence—bills, notices, and catechism lessons—but it seemed to her that God was directing her thoughts elsewhere, summoning her to examine her actions and beliefs. She decided to pray that the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit be strengthened within her: wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord. Those gifts would help her meet the challenges ahead.
Seven years before she had received a letter from the Mother House appointing her
la révérende mère provinciale
of Les Sœurs d’Amour Fraternelle. Eight weeks before the appointment, Sister Joan had sent the Mother Superior in Montreal a telegram informing her of the not-unexpected death of ninety-two-year-old Mother Paul Pius at the school.
Caught up in her own excitement, Sister Grace, so suddenly
Mother
Grace, wasn’t aware that as weeks had turned to months without word from the Mother House, Sister Joan had grown increasingly optimistic that her role of “interim administrator,” as she had proclaimed herself, would be elevated to that of “superior,” in theory, a position under the leadership of Father David, but in practice, the unchallenged head of the school. It was a wish she had not failed to convey to her good friend and co-administrator, Sister Grace
.
It was Grace’s knowledge of this ambition, she suspected, as much as her later promotion, that Sister Joan was never able to forgive.
Mother Grace had taken her appointment as superior at St. Mark’s to be a sign from God; He had chosen her for this position, and she was eager finally to confront the weighty destiny she had believed to be hers since she took her vows. In fact, she now realized, she had been both blind and prideful.
Things had gone well at first. After just one month in her new position, she had not only prevailed upon Father Alphonses to bring volunteer workers from both Hilltop and the Reserve to the school, but she had elicited the promise of extra funding from the Oblates, having written a persuasive letter on Father David’s behalf. From that point on, Father David—or Father Damien, should David be unavailable—had only to sign her letters and, at times, practise a modicum of conviviality when parishioners arrived with hammers and wood. Several repairs, long overdue, were made or scheduled at St. Mark’s, and morale, with the exception of Sister Joan’s, improved greatly. Mother Grace then turned her hand to systemizing the administration, drawing up and balancing a feasible budget, and taking over the ordering of supplies.
“Don’t stir the pot if it’s already boiling,” she had overheard Father David mutter to Father Damien. “Let Gracie do all the work if she’s so hell-bent on it.”
Mais oui
, that had been just fine with her.
At the start of the next school year, she had been determined to institute a new, more liberal visiting practice. Every Sunday, the girls’ parents would be allowed at St. Mark’s for Mass. Afterwards, they could visit their children in one of two rooms, a small one off the school’s entrance for the little girls and a classroom upstairs for the older ones. Parents with both first-year and older students would be allowed to take the younger ones with them to the room set aside for older girls.
Father David had complained that such a practice was in direct opposition to the government of Canada’s policy of assimilation, but she had argued passionately. “How can we reach the children if we do not also encourage enlightenment in their parents?” She had been quite pleased with her oratory in those days. That was before it came back to bite her, as Sister Margaret would put it.
“Our job is not done when our students leave this school. We must continue to reach out to all the Indian race, to instruct and guide on an ongoing basis,” she had argued.
And it had worked. Father David, with Father Damien following his lead, had grudgingly withdrawn his objections. Even dear Father Patrick had expressed his admiration for her “progressive” visiting policy, and a few other Catholic residential schools had followed her course of action, including, not a year later, the new St. Gerard’s School for Boys, to the south. To this day, parents still complained about their sons and daughters having to attend different schools, but it was for the best, Mother Grace was convinced. St. Mark’s had become overcrowded with the influx of students from Antelope Hills after that school burned down and, besides, boys distracted girls from their studies.
She had been optimistic. Mother Paul Pius and most of the sisters, including her, had thought that the opening of St. Gerard’s would solve most of their problems. And it might have, if the staffing had been handled properly. Lifting her glasses, she pressed a finger and thumb against her aching eyes. No use crying over spilt milk, as Sister Bernadette was always saying.
Now, as for the past seven years, students were seated in the chapel, and then parents and younger siblings were led to rows of chairs at the back. After Mass, visiting hour would begin.
* * *
“Eyes straight ahead,” Sister Joan ordered the first-year girls. “No looking at the back of chapel to see who might be there. You are in the presence of God.”
“Crabby God,” Taki whispered.
Rose Marie’s parents hadn’t visited since the moon of first snow. Even Forest Fox Crown came only once in a while and seldom with Aunt Angelique. He nodded at her, but never said anything, just tramped upstairs to visit stupid Adele and stupider Esther.
Taki’s parents hardly ever visited either. They lived far, far away. Most Sundays, about half the girls were without visitors, so the sisters gave them three choices of how to spend visiting hour: help the sisters prepare lunch, take a Sunday school lesson with Sister Cilla, or play in the recreation room and clean it after. No one seemed to notice that Anataki and Rose Marie snuck up to the dormitory and played dolls under their beds. They had tied string around washcloths to make the dolls’ heads, and when Rose Marie found some cotton pads by one of the wardrobes, they made those the bodies, attaching them to the heads with safety pins. At night, they tucked the dolls under their pillows.